Land of the sweet, never sour, Sugar Land, Texas, offers a surburban alternative outside the expanding Houston area. The city has gone by many names. In 1838, two years into the Republic of Texas’s victory over the Republic of Mexico, what is now Sugar Land was named the Oakland Plantation. Stephen F. Austin (the “Father of Texas”) gave land to businessman and administrator Samuel May Williams as payment for his work providing land grants as incentives to bring white settlers to the new republic. In 1853, Williams sold the plantation to his brothers, Nathaniel and Matthew Williams. Together, they combined the plantation with adjoining lands and renamed it Sugar Land. The late 1800s brought a new nickname to Sugar Land among the city’s convict laborers: “Hell Hole on the Brazos.” Sugar Land’s infrastructure expanded in the decades following the end of convict leasing in 1912, resulting in the erasure of the city’s histories of Black and Indigenous removal. The city’s wealth—held almost exclusively by its white business owners, former plantation owners, and political elites—grew thanks to sugar tours, school field trips to the humid banks of the Brazos River, and the wealth generated by sugar production. These legacies of violence, swallowed by the earth and long buried, were unearthed in 2018 when developers disturbed the dirt underneath the city.
Texas has buried its history rather well. Sugar Land is land of the Karankawa and Tonkawa tribes, which gathered at the now commercial banks of Sugar Land’s Oyster Creek and Brazos River. Oakland Plantation began with Indigenous removal and the sinister capitalism that maintained brutal control over Black bodies forced to do hard labor. These were the legacies of plantation violence and its afterlives during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The Williams brothers used Oyster Creek to build a commercial sugar mill, and on Oakland Plantation they forced enslaved people to harvest sugarcane. After the area had been renamed Sugar Land, the city’s penal system began under former Confederate colonel Edward H. Cunningham (also known as the “Texas Sugar King”). It was during this time, when convicts were leased out to work privately owned land, that Sugar Land became known as the Hell Hole on the Brazos. Over the years, more and more privately owned plantation land was transferred to the state, a profitable move that allowed Texas to maintain the city’s economic growth while continuing to benefit from the people generating that growth: Black prison laborers.
Much of the state’s Black history remains difficult to find, often having been relegated to small rural museums. Not to mention that the narrative Texas condones in its education system neglects discussion of enslavement, plantation lives, and prison farms. But Black Texas offers alternative archives mostly unreliant on documents and museum space. These alternatives thrive in orality, testimony, folklore, music—and dirt.
